Environmental and safety regulations are supposed to be explanations for this rise in cost, not rival explanations to "cost is the issue" (since they take that as given).
- Nuclear power plants are very complex. They are more "engineered" than "constructed", with hundreds of kilometers of tubes and wires. Pouring the concrete is the easy part.
- Nuclear power plants deal with an incredibly dangerous environment: high pressures, high temperatures, radioactivity, hazardous chemicals. Everything has to be tested, re-tested, and certified. Many parts will be near impossible to replace once it enters production, and the plant is supposed to be operational for decades.
- Nuclear power plants are safety-critical. Contrary to many other structures of similar complexity, things can get way worse than a big explosion. They have the potential to contaminate the site (or even the surrounding country) for decades or centuries. Failure is simply not acceptable.
- Safety regulations have been getting stricter over the years, because supposedly "100% safe" plants keep having accidents and the population is not very happy about that.
The existing stock of nuclear power plants is an offshoot of several military programs. The most common design is pretty much a submarine power plant on steroids, which turned out to be less than ideal. Things like "safety" and "profit" were almost seen as a suggestion more so than a requirement.
Newly-built power plants are required to incorporate over 50 years of innovation, but it turns out almost nobody has the skills to actually build them. They have simply gotten too complex to construct!
The ones attempted recently in South Carolina and Georgia cost so much because people in a position to block building them want it that way. Once a nuke project starts, a torrent of money starts flowing. Everybody with a stake expects a share, and none want it ever to end. Finishing a plant would plug that flow. If it looks like the flow will dry up regardless, they might deliver something at the end.
We see the same process with urban tunnels and big military procurements. It is all perfectly legal. It is probably not fixable.
Thus far, wind and solar projects have mostly avoided it, maybe in part because their legitimate costs are easy to estimate.
Existing nukes also cost more than renewables to operate, because they actually have operating costs. Big steam turbines, in particular, need regular overhauls. So, it is hard for anything with a steam turbine to compete with something that has none. Reactors need also operation, inspections, refueling, security, compliance monitoring... the list goes on.
Solar panels might need to be dusted off, or replaced. The worst that can happen to a wind turbine is to catch fire.
Not being a lawyer and all that, would some of this holding of the hands-out not qualify as some sort of grift or worse? Are there not laws already in place for this stuff? Is it a case of it being too hard to prove so no prosecutions are brought?
Practically speaking sure, but all one needs to do is hide the grift behind a veneer of altruism and people[0] lap it up. Also half the time it is the lawmakers behind the grift. Do the phrases: “Think of the children“, “we need an environmental impact report“, or “This is a building of historical significance“ ring a bell? Behind each of them is an entity(ies) looking to advance their interest, which is often, but not always, profit from the increased diligence required or profit from the obstruction and the induced scarcity.
[0]The voting electorate, anyway.
Francis Fukuyama uses the term "vetocracy" for our government. So many layers, so many checks and balances. Some of them were even a good idea at the time (eg in response to abusers like Robert Caro).
Every petty tyrant or crank has to be bought off, rolled over, or buried under. That takes time, resources, lawyers, political capital, stamina, tenacity.
I'm not even so sure vetocracy is a wholly bad thing, in principle. Of course people impacted by projects should be considered, heard, and hopefully accommodated. But, as others have already stated, vetocracy has been weaponized to thwart all progress, regardless of how much popular support is behind them.
For instance, we need expand our power grid, roughly 3x bigger. The challenge is our current patchwork of veto points (local, county, state, regional, national). So someone(s) will have to expend huge political capital to overhaul the regulatory and permitting system. Or we simply won't reach our goal for net zero carbon emissions.
When I mentioned "grift or worse", extortion is what I was thinking of but just unable to use my brain to get to extortion. So thanks for getting me there.
Of course, the more persuasion you need, the more it costs, and the more backing you need. So it is usually better to budget less and plan on overruns, instead. And, finishing on time would mean cutting off all those backers; thus, the schedule is overrun, too.
Thing is, most things somebody wants to spend $billions in public money on shouldn't proceed.
Their core backup safety feature of being roughly bird shaped requires only a few moving parts, none of which are operating at extreme temperature or require cooling.
No, the first post is correct - safety is not the issue. We build keep building dams, and dam failures have killed far, far more people than nuclear. Other comments about nimby are also off the mark. People whose properties are flooded hate dams, nimby's force delays measuring decades, yet we keep building dams.
The comment you are responding contains the answer to the riddle it posed:
> a thousand of them are in the air right this second.
If the one factory could build 1000 nuclear reactors, complexity would not be an issue there either. And I'm sure after building 1000 of them, the price would not so much as drop as plummet. Which is why small nuclear reactors built in factories are such a common meme.
But the first 100 of those small nuclear reactors will be hideously expensive based on the quotes we have from people who've actually tried to do it - far more than a couple of big plants generating the same output. And the big plants already being crushed by cost overruns.
Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them. That seems to be the only way it could happen, because after decades of refusals I think we can safely say the banks aren't interested in funding a technology that turns out energy 100% more expensive than current competitors.
> Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them.
The thing is none of these people actually want nuclear power. They either want to redirect resources which would make fossil fuels irrelevant or feast forever off of the public teat whilst pretending to build a power plant.
The forces stopping nuclear power have very little to do with safety or greens or nimbys. It's a combination of their cost and of the power fossil fuels have. It just so happens that the fossil fuel interests are inadverently on the side of continuing to have human habitable land by virtue of leveraging the safety issue for their own greed.
Ironically they've probably hastened their own demise because if they hadn't forced the regulation we'd probably be too busy cleaning up nuclear disasters to think about weaning off of coal.
As stated does sound a bit pompous, but at the core, it's not inaccurate
Total meltdown to a China Syndrome with the slag melting its way to the water table is pretty much the worst I can imagine.
Fast reactors may be necessary for a fully nuclear powered world, because the uranium runs out too quickly without breeding. And 233U or plutonium skate much closer to the edge of prompt supercriticality, since they produce about half the delayed neutrons of 235U.
* Technology makes repetitive operations cheaper. You build a factory for hundred million dollars, make a billion gadgets on it, and every gadget costs you ten cents to make. Nuclear projects lack the economy of scale: even the Navy is going to order reactors by a dozen, and civil power plant reactors may see even fewer installations per model. Thus the huge costs of the R&D and the factory are amortized over but a few reactors, making each of them very expensive.
* Due to small production scale, various custom materials needed for nuclear reactors, like special steels, are much more expensive than more widely used materials.
Nuclear is now in a position similar to solar cells 15 years ago: a promising technology which is too expensive due to small scale and bespoke nature of their production. It took a decade of betting on them, pouring money into them, and giving various discounts to the customers to get where we are now, with solar panels which are efficient, affordable, and available. I suppose nuclear tech would need the same to become cost-efficient. France did / does something along these lines; the US does not.
...In the opposite direction, but about the same magnitude.
Unlike solar 15 years ago, nuclear has been around 60 years already and received huge amounts of subsidies (much more than solar, excluding all the extra military subsidies). So what is fundamentally different now that would change the essentially linear scaling to an exponential scaling and why should we not invest into the tech where we see ongoing exponential scaling of cost already with no indication of slowing (solar and wind)?
Renewables involve larger numbers of decoupled systems, where failures of parts don't propagate to shut down the whole thing. If that PV module fails, or that wind turbine is struck by lightning and catches fires, the rest of the system goes on as before.
It all depend on how one want to perceive the system. A wind turbine struck by lightning might not propagate too much, but a poor weather prediction can have massive propagation for the system as a whole.
The grid is also a resilient system where individual parts can fail independently. Weather prediction is correlated, but has no effect on the cost of individual parts.
Broadly, construction is the singular industry where productivity hasn't improved with modern technology.
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/sketch-of-a-theor...
If you want those reasons, go for it. Iran for instance is pursuing at least one of these goals when it works towards nuclear "power". Just don't expect affordable electricity at the end...
Generally construction does not significantly benifit from economies of scale, while fabrication does. Now we could build lots of small scale reactors, but while construction costs might come down (so far completely unproven) running costs most definitely would go up. You don't want to run even a small scale nuclear reactor without qualified staff, security etc..
So people like Dyson, who learned calculus by spending his Christmas vacation working his way through a textbok for fun, were no longer available to design reactors. So progress on, for example, thorium reactors ended in the US in 01966 (thorium BWR is from 01960, thorium LWBR is from 01962, thorium MSR is from 01964, thorium HTGR is from 01966). In other countries it took a few more years. Teller, who worked on TRIGA with Dyson, seems to have stopped working on reactor design in 01960. The elves left Middle Earth. So hospitals still use TRIGA today for nuclear medicine.
I don't see the key issue here as being that Dyson and Teller were brilliant, though they were brilliant. Rather, it's that Dyson and Teller were curious and playful. I think curious and playful people exploring the possibilities of nuclear reactors will come up with many improvements, even if they are the ordinary kind of stupid people. It might take them five times as long as it would have taken people like Dyson, and there might be more accidental deaths along the way, but they will get there. But today the occasional curious and playful person who tries to investigate nuclear reactors is likely to get arrested, even if they pose less risk to their neighbors than Marie Curie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Handl (or assassinated by the Mossad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...) and so the Navy is still using reactors very similar to the ones they used 60 years ago.
I see questions like "the technology available has improved, so why have costs risen?" as symptomatic of the worldview that anything can be bought. Teller, Dyson, and Handl were not optimizing their life decisions to maximize their earning power; they were curious about the world and wanted to preserve liberal democracy. You can't buy that. If you announce that you are going to spend a lot of money on nuclear reactor development, it will attract people who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power, not people who are curious about the world.
You maximize your earning power by owning things, not by learning things or figuring things out. People who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power will be no good at ferreting out possible improvements that can be made to nuclear reactors, because you don't get paid any more for making breakthroughs than you do for just plodding along.
Less, in fact, because nine tenths of the time when you're doing the kind of things that lead to breakthroughs, the things you try don't work, so you aren't delivering anything of value to anybody.
The other issue is that "Why can't we build nuclear power plants?" is a subset of "Why can't we build?" and I think the answer to that is basically that people aren't free to build. But nuclear power plants are probably the kind of building that people are least free to build.
It’s, as I understand it, to draw attention to the briefness of our lives and contextualize the decisions we make that have effects long beyond “now”.
Personally, I think it’s kind of weird to base it upon the supposed birth year of a religious figure who may not have even lived, but standards are useful, I suppose.
The reactor was designed in the span of a few months. They started in the summer of 01956. The first one was commissioned and built in May of 01958. And it ran until 1997, steadily producing 250 MW with occasional "pulses" up to 1,000 MW, the entire time.
Let's take a minute to appreciate that. They went from design to implementation in less than 2 years, that's lightning fast even in startup terms. And their design has never malfunctioned, ever. AFAICT, there are 66 of these reactors out there in the world that have operated for nearly 7 decades with 0 incidents. Some of them are even true to form and are operated by teenagers!
And I suspect that's the real reason why nuclear power is so expensive. While regulatory burdens, subsidies, and general corruption do indeed explain the exponential cost increases for nuclear power, the truth is that these are proximate causes. The distal cause is simple; the reactors suck. We've been designing them wrong for decades now, and we need to make rethink them from the ground up.
Luckily, I'm not the only person who thinks that. Far more smarter people have been bringing the fun back to nuclear engineering, and we are finally getting a series look at concepts like pebble bed reactors.
I hope that someday we'll have forever batteries and power sources that are small, self-contained, and can be carted for use anywhere, including space.
Achieving this goal requires everything from the kinds of modular designs NuScale https://www.nuscalepower.com/ and Terrapower https://www.terrapower.com/ are working on to Zeno Power's radioisotope systems, https://www.zenopower.com/
I am excited for the future again.
The only group I know of trying to do this is https://hb11.energy/, whose plan is to laser-initiate an avalanche of boron-11/hydrogen "fusion" and throw the resulting alpha particles up a million-volt potential difference. Though it's not guaranteed, that might end up being cheaper than a steam turbine and generator.
Without such improvements, nuclear energy is only really appealing in environments where PV and wind aren't an option — like submarines, aircraft carriers, Antarctic research stations, deep-space probes, and Scotland — or as a hedge against unforeseen difficulties in scaling up grid-scale energy storage and the like.
But I might be wrong about where the costs in coal plants come from, and I'd be very grateful to find that out.
I really appreciated your "On Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children”," by the way.
Evidently naval reactors are a lot better at this, though.
From what I've heard the amount of storage is not very large if you assume sufficiently large grids and the total system cost is expected to be lower than what we currently pay for electricity.
Power plants are commonly depreciated over 30 or even 40 years. Electricity consumption in the US doubled during the 01960s, and it doubled in PRC during the 02010s. If the transport sector in the US went all-electric, that would double electrical consumption again even without increasing energy use.
How can you predict what fraction of your users will be using electric vehicles 15 years from now, and whether they'll charge them in the daytime or at night? That depends on, among other things, whether they'll go back to working in offices, whether the offices will have chargers, and how much cheaper it will be for them to charge during the day than at night. And that, in turn, depends on what kind of time-of-use rate schedules you can get the public utility commission to approve. Will people insulate their houses more so they don't need to heat them at night? That depends not only on the rate schedule but their future expectations of the rate schedule, as well as what their house buyers' expectations of the rate schedule. How much will superinsulating your walls raise the house's sale price?
How about home TCES — if daytime electricity is sufficiently cheap, such forms of energy storage might become popular as a cheaper alternative to superinsulation, and maybe suppress the demand for nighttime electricity further in cold areas; but we don't have any mass-market experience with them right now. Will building codes, or insurance underwriters, impede the wide adoption of TCES after the first homeowner files a massive insurance claim to replace their hardwood floor ruined by a calcium-chloride spill? Will dirt-cheap rail-shipped carnallite drop the price of TCES further than calcium chloride possibly could? Will new carnallite deposits be found, closer to large cities?
How about the future of industry? Mass PV rollout will drop the price of energy dramatically, so industrial processes that are currently unprofitable because they use too much energy will become profitable. They might outcompete more energy-efficient incumbents.
The first example of this might be aluminum replacing steel in more and more uses; today it's so much more expensive than steel that it's only used in places where its lighter weight is a big advantage, but with lower energy costs (and shorter shipping distances) it might replace steel for many more purposes. Minimills recycling existing steel might be able to fulfill the entire steel demand for quite a while — steel mills that smelt iron from ore would shut down entirely, and the 30-year-depreciated power plants built to supply those mills might find themselves without the demand they were built for. And this might happen by 02039. This is maybe the most predictable outcome of much lower prices for electrical energy, but probably won't be the most dramatic one.
So shifts in electrical demand will depend on cultural change, diffusion of innovations, regulatory capture, consumer expectations, and cost-driven substitution in the radically changed economic landscape.
The last time the price of energy dropped so dramatically might have been Watt's steam-engine in 01776. The dislocations in society that resulted would have been very hard to predict.
This is a much smaller gap than I had expected, so maybe the switch to electrically reduced iron (directly, as in electrolytic iron, or indirectly) won't be as big a change as I thought.
The earlier series of the blog post we are discussing actually talks about that a significant fraction of the cost of a nuclear plant is the thermal power plant part, which is the same as for a coal plant for example.
Moreover, actually having to use a reactor for power generation significantly increases the complexity of the design, you suddenly need to heat water, which means two different water cycles which mustn't contaminate each other... And having water involved makes things more tricky anyway because of corrosion...
Obviously, the vast majority of nuclear power plants are of the suck type. If you want a regulatory blank slate you are going to have to shut them all down and replace them with good power plants. The regulations are there to deal with the "suck" of the nuclear industry. Get rid of the suck and you will make the nuclear industry very unhappy, in other words the legacy nuclear power industry is exactly the problem that drives regulations and costs up.